x, and the narrowness
of her sex's sphere. She dreamed of a broadly human, practical,
disinterested relation between men and women, based on the actual work of
the world; its social, artistic, intellectual work; all that has made
civilization.

"We women are starved"--she thought, "because men will only marry
us--or make playthings of us. But the world is only just--these last
years--open to us, as it has been open to men for thousands of
generations. We want to taste and handle it for ourselves; as men do.
Why can't they take us by the hand--a few of us--teach us, confide in
us, open the treasure-house to us?--and let us alone! To be treated as
good fellows!--that's all we ask. Some of us would make such fratchy
wives--and such excellent friends! I vow I should make a good friend! Why
shouldn't Lord Tatham try?"

And letting her work fall upon the grass, she sat smiling and thinking,
her pale brown hair blown back by the wind. In her simple gray dress,
which showed the rippling beauty of every line, she was like one of these
innumerable angels or virtues, by artists illustrious or forgotten, which
throng the golden twilight of an Italian church; drawing back the
curtains of a Doge; hovering in quiet skies; or offering the Annunciation
lily, from one side of a great tomb, to the shrinking Madonna on the
other. These creations of Italy in her early prime are the most
spontaneous of the children of beauty. There are no great differences
among them; the common type is lovely; they spring like flowers from one
root, in which are the forces both of Greece and the Italy of Leonardo.
It was their harmony, their cheerfulness, their touch of something
universal, that were somehow reproduced in this English girl, and that
made the secret of her charm.

She went on thinking about Tatham.

Presently she had built a castle high in air; she had worked it out--how
she was to make Lord Tatham clearly understand, before he had any chance
of proposing (if that were really in the wind, and she were not a mere
lump of conceit), that marrying was not her line; but that, as a friend,
he might rely upon her. Anything--in particular--that she could do to
help him to a wife, short of offering herself, was at his service. She
would be eyes and ears for him; she would tell him things he did not in
the least suspect about the sex.

But as to marrying! She rose from her seat, stretching her arms toward
the sky and the blossoming trees, in tha